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Overview
Irishman Jack McNulty is a “temporary gentleman”—an Irishman whose commission in the British army in World War II was never permanent. Sitting in his lodgings in Accra, Ghana, in 1957, he’s writing the story of his life with desperate urgency. He cannot take one step further without examining all the extraordinary events that he has seen. A lifetime of war and world travel—as a soldier in World War II, an engineer, a UN observer—has brought him to this point. But the memory that weighs heaviest on his heart is that of the beautiful Mai Kirwan, and their tempestuous, heartbreaking marriage. Mai was once the great beauty of Sligo, a magnetic yet unstable woman who, after sharing a life with Jack, gradually slipped from his grasp.
Award-winning author Sebastian Barry’s The Temporary Gentleman is the sixth book in his cycle of separate yet interconnected novels that brilliantly reimagine characters from Barry’s own family.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780698163485 |
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Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
Publication date: | 05/01/2014 |
Sold by: | Penguin Group |
Format: | eBook |
Pages: | 320 |
Sales rank: | 620,009 |
File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof.***
Copyright © 2014 by Sebastian Barry
Chapter One
‘It’s a beautiful night and no mistake. You would never think there was a war somewhere.’
These less than prophetic words were spoken by a young navy second lieutenant, on the wide, night-bedarkened deck of our supply ship, bound for Accra. He was a tubby little man, whom the day’s sun had scorched red. Happy to hear an Irish accent I asked him where he was from and he said, with that special enthusiasm Irish people reserve for each other when they accidentally meet abroad, Donegal. We talked then about Bundoran in the summer, where my father had often brought his band. It was a pleasure to shoot the breeze with him for a few moments as the engines growled on, deep below.
The cargo was eight hundred men and officers, all headed for various parts of British Africa. There was the noise of the little parliaments of the card-players, and the impromptu music-halls of the whisky drinkers, and true enough a lovely mole-grey air moved across the ship in a beneficent wave. We could see the coast of Africa lying out along a minutely fidgeting shoreline. The only illuminations were the merry lights of the ship, and the sombre philosophical lights of God above. Otherwise the land ahead was favoured only by darkness, a confident brushstroke of rich, black ink.
I had been in an excellent mood for days, having picked the winner of the Middle Park Stakes at Nottingham. Every so often, I stuck a hand in my right pocket and jingled part of my winnings in the shape of a few half-crowns. The rest of it was inserted into an inside pocket of my uniform – a fold of lovely crisp white banknotes. I’d got up to Nottingham on a brief furlough, having been given a length of time not quite long enough to justify the long trek across England and Ireland to Sligo.
France had fallen to Hitler, and suddenly, bizarrely, colonies like the Gold Coast were surrounded by the new enemy, the forces of the Vichy French. No one knew what was going to happen, but we were being shunted down quickly to be in place to blow bridges, burst canals, and break up roads, if the need arose. We had heard the colonial regiments were being swelled by new recruits, thousands of Gold Coast men rushing to defend the Empire. I suppose this was when Tom Quaye, though of course I didn’t know him then, joined up.
So I was standing there, flush with my winnings, not thinking of much, as always somewhat intoxicated by being at sea, somewhat in love with an unknown coastline, and the intriguing country lying in behind. I had also about a bottle of Scotch whisky in me, though I stood rooted as a tree for all that. It was a moment of simple exhilaration. My red hair, the selfsame red hair that had first brought me to the attention of Mai, for it was not I who said hello to her first, but she, with her playful question in the simple neat quadrangle of the university, ‘I suppose you put a colour in that?’ – my red hair was brushed flat back from my forehead, my second lieutenant’s cap holding it down like a pot lid, my cheeks had been shaved by my batman Percy Welsh, my under-clothes were starched, my trousers were creased, my shoes were signalling back brightly to the moon – when suddenly the whole port side of the ship seemed to go up, right in front of my eyes, an enormous gush and geyser of water, a shuddering explosion, an ear-numbing rip of metallic noise, and a vast red cornet of flames the size of the torch on the Statue of Liberty. The young second lieutenant from Donegal was suddenly as dead as one of those porpoises you will see washed up on the beach at Enniscrone after a storm, on the deck beside me, felled by a jagged missile of stray metal. Men came tearing up from below, the doorways oozing them out as if so much boiling molasses, there were cries and questions even as the gigantic fountain of displaced water collapsed and found the deck, and hammered us flat there as if we were blobs of dough. Two of my sappers were trying to peel me back up from the deck, itself splintered and cratered from the force, and now other stray bits of the ship rained down, clattering and banging and boasting and killing.
‘That was a fucking torpedo,’ said my sergeant, with perfect redundancy, a little man called Ned Johns from Cornwall, the most knowledgeable man for a fuze I ever worked with. He probably knew the make and poundage of the torpedo, but if he did he didn’t say. The next second the huge ship started to pitch to port, and before I could grab him, Ned Johns went off sliding down the new slope and smashing into the rail, gathered himself, stood up, looked back at me, and then was wrenched across the rail and out of view. I knew we were holed deep under the waterline, I could more or less feel it in my body, something vital torn out of the ship echoed in the pit of my stomach, some mischief done, deep, deep in some engine room or cargo hold.
My other helper, Johnny ‘Fats’ Talbott, a man so lean you could have used him for spare wire, as poor Ned Johns once said, in truth was using me now as a kind of bollard, but that was no good, because the ship seemed to make a delayed reaction to its wound, and shuddered upward, the ship’s rail rearing up ten feet in a bizarre and impossible movement, catching poor Johnny completely off guard, since he had been bracing himself against a force from the other direction, and off he went behind me, pulling the trouser leg off my uniform as he did so, sending my precious half-crowns firing in every direction.
So for a moment of odd calm I stood there, one leg bare to the world, my cap still in place inexplicably, myself drenched so thoroughly I felt one hundred per cent seawater. An iron ladder full of men, from God knows where, maybe even from inside the ship, or from the side of the command deck more likely, with about a dozen calling and screaming persons clinging to it like forest monkeys, moved past me as if it were a trolley being wheeled by the demon of this attack, and crossed the ravaged deck, and pitched down into the moiling, dark sea behind. Everything roared for that moment, the high night sky of blankening stars, the great and immaculate silver serving dish of the sea itself, the rended ship, the offended and ruined men – and then, precipitatively, a silence reigned, the shortest reign of any silence in the empires of silence, the whole vista, the far-off coast, the deck, the sea, was as still for a moment as a painting, as if someone had just painted it all in his studio, and was gazing at it, contemplating it, reaching out to put a finishing touch on it, of smoke, of fire, of blood, of water, and then I felt the whole ship leave me, sink under my boots so suddenly that there was for that second a gap between me and it, so that wasn’t I like an angel, a winged man suspended. Then gravity broke the spell, gravity ruined the bloody illusion, and I went miserably and roaringly downward with the ship, the deck broke into the waters, it smashed through the sacred waters like a child breaks an ice puddle in a Sligo winter, it made a noise like that, of something solid, something icy breaking, glass really, but not glass, infinitely soft and receiving water, the deeps, the dreaded deeps, the reason why fishermen never learn to swim, let the waters take us quickly, let there be no thrashing and hoping and swimming, no, let your limbs go, be calm, put your trust in God, pray quick to your Redeemer, and I did, just like an Aran fisherman, and gave up my soul to God, and sent my last signal of love flying back across Europe to Mai, Mai, and my children, up the night-filthied coast of Africa, across the Canaries, across the old boot of England and the ancient baby-shape of Ireland, I sent her my last word of love, I love thee, I love thee, Mai, I am sorry, I am sorry.
The ocean closed over my head with its iron will, and the fantastical suck of the sinking ship drew me down as if a hundred demons were yanking on my legs, down down we went, our handsome troopship made in Belfast, the loose bodies of the already drowned, the myriad papers and plans for war, the tins of sardines we had taken in in Algiers, the fabulous materiel, the brand new trucks, the stocks of tyres, the fifty-three horses, the wooden stakes, the planks, the boxes of carefully stored explosives, all down down to Neptune we went, extinguished in a moment without either glory or cowardice, an action of the gods, of queer physics, that huge metal mass sucker-punched, beaten, ruined, wrecked, fucked to all hell as Ned Johns would say, and I felt the water all around as if I were in the body of a physical creature, as if this were its blood, and the scientifically explainable forces at work were its sinews and muscles. And it stopped my mouth and found the secret worm-whorls of my ears, and it wanted entry into me, but I had grabbed, stolen, fetched out with an instinctive exuberance, a last great gulp of breath, and I was bearing this down with me, in my chest, around my heart, as my singing response, my ears were now thundering with the thunders of the sea, I thought I could hear the ship itself cry out in a crazy vocabulary of pain, as if a man could learn this lingo somewhere, the tearing death-cries of a vessel. All the while as if still standing on the deck, but that was not possible, and then I thought the ship was turning sideways, like a giant in its bed, and I had no choice but to go with it, I was like a salmon looking for the seam in a waterfall, where it could grip its way to the gravel-beds on grips of mere water, and now I thought I was rushing over the side, away from the deck, accelerated by some unknown force faster than the ship itself, and I was scraping along metal, I felt long sea-grass and barnacles, surely I could not have, but I thought I did, and just as the ship went right over, or so I imagined it, how could I know, in the deepest dark, the darkest deepest dark that ever was, an instance of utter blankness, suddenly I felt the very keel of the troopship, something wide and round and good, the sacred keel, the foundation of the sailor’s hope, the guarantor of his sleep between watches, but all up the wrong way, in the wrong place, violently torn from its proper place, and just in that moment, just in that moment, with a great groan, a weird and menacing sighing, a sort of silence as the worst noise in creation, the keel halted and went back the other way, like the spine of a whale, as if the ship were now fish, and because I was holding onto the keel, riding it, like a fly on a saddle, it sort of threw me back the other way, catapulted me slowly, Mr. Cannonball himself in the tuppenny circus of old at Enniscrone, my childhood flaring in my head, my whole life flaring, and then I seemed to be in the shrouds of the little forward mast, and I squeezed my body into a tight ball, again pure instinct, not a thought in my mind, and as the killed ship rolled slowly over, seeking its doom at least in a balletic and beautiful curve, the furled sails rolled me over and over, giving me strange speed, volition unknown, and I unfolded myself, like a lover rising victorious from the marriage bed, and I spread my arms, and I thrashed them into the ocean, and swam, and swam, looking for the surface, praying for it, gone a mile beyond mere breathlessness, ready to grow gills to survive this, and then it was there, the utterly simple sky, God’s bare lights, in the serene harbours of the constellations, and I grabbed like a greedy child onto something, a shard of something, a ruined and precious fragment, and there I floated, gripping on, half-mad, for a minute without memory, oh Mai, Mai, for a minute all absence and presence, a creature blanked out and destroyed, a creature bizarrely renewed.
By the grace of God we were travelling in convoy that night. And by the grace of God, for some reason only known to its captain and its crouching sailors, the submarine melted off into the deeps, not that any of us saw it. A corvette bristling with machine guns manoeuvered up near me, I heard the confident voices with wild gratitude, arms reached down into the darkness for me, pulled me from the chaos, and I slumped, suddenly lumpish and exhausted, at the boots of my rescuers, falling down to lie with other survivors, some with dark-blooded wounds, a few entirely naked, the clothes sucked off them.
I lay there, ticking with life, triumphant, terrified. I noticed myself checking my inside pocket for the roll of banknotes, as if watching someone else, as if I were two people, and I laughed at my other self for his foolishness.
We steamed into Accra the following morning.
What People are Saying About This
Praise for The Temporary Gentleman:
“One of the best writers in the English language....[Barry’s] soul-wrenching narratives and incantatory prose...are powerful canvases of the human spirit.”—Marie Arana, The Washington Post
“Barry’s prose has a dreamlike quality....The raw elegance of his storytelling has its own beauty.”—Booklist
Praise for A Long Long Way:
“A deeply moving story of courage and fidelity.”—J. M. Coetzee, Nobel Prize-winning author of Disgrace
“Barry succeeds admirably in creating complex individuals who find themselves trapped in a brutal reality.”—Los Angeles Times
Praise for On Canaan's Side:
“Sebastian Barry's handling of voice and cadence is masterly. His fictional universe is filled with life, quiet truth and exquisite intimacy; it is also fully alert to the power and irony of history. In evoking Lilly Bere, he has created a most memorable character.”—Colm Tóibín, author of the Costa Novel Award-winning Brooklyn
“A story of love and loss, as Irish as the white heather and as big-hearted as America itself.”—Helen Simonson, New York Times bestselling author of Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand
“A marvel of empathy and tact.”—Joseph O’Neill, author of the PEN/Faulkner Award winning novel Netherland
Praise for The Secret Scripture
“Prose of often startling beauty.”—Margot Livesey, author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy
“Language of surpassing beauty….It is like a song, with all the pulse of the Irish language.”—The New York Times
“Luminous and lyrical.”—O, The Oprah Magazine
Praise for The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty:
“A symphony of a novel, and you’ll sing along and wander…into the next century.”—Frank McCourt, author of Angela’s Ashes
“[Barry’s] words have a stony allure of the Irish poets and the lyrical pull of an epic storyteller.”—The Boston Globe
Reading Group Guide
INTRODUCTION
“I miss her face, its beauty, and its beauty lost.” (p. 276)
Jack McNulty’s story begins in the middle. It’s World War II, and the native Irishman is en route to Africa aboard a British troop ship when a torpedo destroys it. Jack miraculously survives, buffered from the shock by the “bottle of Scotch whisky” (p. 3) in his belly. From there, The Temporary Gentleman spirals back to Jack’s early years with the beautiful Mai Kirwan and forward to his solitary future in a free Ghana.
Why Jack returns to Ghana—or the Gold Coast, as it was called under British rule—he cannot say. It’s 1957, and his days as a soldier, engineer, and UN observer are behind him. Jack tells himself, “I will go back to Ireland, I must, I must, I have duties there, not least to my children” (p. 13). But first he is compelled to write an account of his troubled life with Mai.
In 1922, Jack is a shy engineering student from working class Sligo. Elegant and outspoken, Mai comes from a prominent Galway family. She and “her friends were the new girls of the century, who had come into the university on fearless feet” (p. 14). Jack is instantly smitten, but fears that he is reaching above his station.
Much to his surprise, Mai returns his regard and decides that Jack must meet her parents. Mai never drank alcohol herself, but Jack makes two stops along the way, so he can take “the questioning of her father more or less under the anaesthetic of four whiskies” (p. 47). It is clear to Jack that Mai’s father is not impressed, but Frank Kirwan keeps his opinions to himself—at least in the beginning.
When it is far too late to make a difference, Jack can see how Mai’s beauty and charisma masked some of her fault lines. On the day of their wedding, she flees the ceremony in tears. In time, Jack will discover that Mai is ill-equipped to manage the quotidian responsibilities of adulthood.
While writing his memoir in Ghana, Jack is cared for by a native servant named Tom Quaye. Tom is “exactly [Jack’s] age, down to the very month” (p. 17), and—like his employer—a veteran soldier who fought on the side of the British. Jack likes Tom and believes that his “houseboy” sincerely returns his affection.
Three years earlier and after four decades of heavy drinking, Jack had given up alcohol completely. “It just seemed the right thing to do” (p. 38). But when Tom invites him out to a local music club, a taste of palm wine sets off a night of wild revelry that will change the course of Jack’s life.
Acclaimed poet, playwright, and novelist twice short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, Sebastian Barry is widely acknowledged as one of the most masterful storytellers at work today. In The Temporary Gentleman, Barry offers an exquisitely multilayered tale that explores Jack and Mai’s doomed marriage as it plays out against the wider stage of British imperialism.
ABOUT SEBASTIAN BARRY
Sebastian Barry has won the Costa Book of the Year Award, the Hughes & Hughes Irish Novel of the Year Award, and the Walter Scott Prize. He lives in Ireland.
A CONVERSATION WITH SEBASTIAN BARRY
I probably learned to write from writing poems—rewriting, endlessly, endlessly. In my archive at the Harry Ransom Centre the evidence lies in boxes—the petty history of long, diligent, happy hours waiting for words to click into place. But were they true poems? I don’t know. Poetry is the highest art, in my view, but a prose writer can learn a lot from it—the precision, the clock-making aspect of it. I did write prose for a few years then and by 1986 had written a first play, a mad piece, forty-nine pages of monologue. But there was no plan really. Looking back, it was as if I were trying to construct stepping stones across the choppy waters of a life, and I used whatever materials came to hand. I suppose the driving force was survival!
I do prefer poetry ultimately, but not my own poetry—Michael Longley, the late Jack Gilbert, etc., all the modern greats. I miss Seamus Heaney walking through Dublin.
It would be odd to write every day, just as it would be odd to climb mountains all the time. I like to wait. It is part of the discipline. Wait for the whistle tune of a book, patiently, allowing the growing feeling of alarm and stupidity. Very important for me. For each book, I have usually written and finished about two chapters, working over and over them, maybe for half a year—and then the rest of the book might follow much more quickly. The full flow of a book is a fine time— the opposite obviously of waiting. I feel I may have “retired” from the theatre (possibly an illusion), so I am concentrating on novels now. Read for a year, write for a year, rewrite for a year.
They certainly do. Jack’s shadow man was my own maternal grandfather, with whom I shared a room as a boy. He had been all over the world by the time he was twenty. From the Khyber Pass to the port of Lagos. An inveterate storyteller, a widower still in love with his wife, though their marriage had been a nightmare. Of course I shouldn’t have known that, but my mother told us endless, obsessive stories about the horrors of her childhood—not in his hearing. I suppose a strange upbringing! But I loved them all, those people.
It’s a sad fact that most of it was much worse, or seems to me, now, much worse. There are many ways to tell the same story, thankfully, and I am mindful of the old dictum “a man can bear only so much reality.” But even if I skirt the volcanoes, I think you can still smell the sulphur—only too well. But a story is a story—laboratory conditions to test human experience, so that the reader is in that respect safe—and hopefully the writer.
Couldn’t be far off—as much of a problem, I mean. It seems to me at age fifty-eight that alcohol is as dangerous, as inescapable, as unpredictable, very occasionally as delightful, and oftentimes as murderous as religion in Ireland, yes; and all the more lethal for being both invisible and acceptable, all at the same time. But then it is also a great social drug, I understand that, and the Romans thought life would be insupportable without wine. Yet, the havoc, the havoc. But not, physically, for Jack—Mai has a different response to it. It is said that so-called indigenous people have no defenses against alcohol—but I think it is universal. It starts out as a great comfort for the afflicted maybe, but year by year, decade by decade, it exacts its price. Is it an Irish problem? Not so much, because English drinking is just the same. Is it a human problem? Is it worth the candle, as they say? A mystery—a dark and sometimes bright mystery.
No, but I think ladies thought gin was more dainty, maybe—better for their waistlines. I don’t know if it is. All drinking is shameful for Mai, because she knows her father would be heartbroken were he still alive. Drinking seems more shameful for Jack after he gives it up, and falls off the wagon.
Drinker.
Well, President De Valera kept us neutral in the war, because he was afraid of the political terror of the 1910s and 1920s returning into Irish life. Ireland was sick of all that. But twenty thousand men went and fought in the Allied forces—it had been two hundred thousand in the First [World] War, when we were still part of Britain. There was a blackout on information in Britain too, but in Ireland it was almost total. If you were in the British army, you couldn’t wear your uniform at home on furlough. It was possible in remote areas, where there would be poor communications anyway, to be unaware of the war. There was a feeling that the war meant little enough to Ireland—generally. A minority was horrified by that. It was called in Ireland “the Emergency” and was felt mostly as food shortages and rationing. A very strange time—and possibly strangely damaging to the national psyche for many years.
I think only in writing things down do we see the event properly—and in writing a life story, see ourselves properly—even for the first time. Meet ourselves, you might say, like Dante meets himself in Dante’s Wood.
I write to sing—it is my version of singing. Singing reveals the core of the singer, much quicker than talking. You could talk to a person for twenty years and not know them—then, one night, hear them sing, and all is revealed.
I am reading and reading for a new novel. I have thirty books on my desk about indigenous peoples, “natives in their native place,” as we in Ireland were once ourselves—I mean, an intensely tribal people, round houses and all. Indigenous peoples, and what happened when the colonists washed through their worlds. In some cases very recent history—in some cases, now, as I write this. More sad stories!
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS